Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a wide reaching computer security system and method designed to remove virtually any if not all steganographic alterations in any data file or files or across data files.
Description of Related Art
Current wisdom in the field of computer science embraces a) acknowledgement of the threat of steganography in data files and b) the importance of detecting the presence of steganographic alteration when and where it appears, prior to c) removing or neutralizing such alterations as desired once they are detected.
It is already well known, in the computer security art, that steganography involves the placing of messages within images or other data files, in ways that the embedded messages cannot be detected by visual inspection and often times not even by other inspection/detection means. If a “bad actor” (criminals, etc.) can encrypt a message into an image or other data file, the message can include matters of personal identity theft, child pornography, national security and etc., and can pass messages undetected from computer to computer unless there is a tool to catch and remove (or neutralize) the hidden message. Damage can occur ranging from financial losses—possibly in the extreme—to and including matters of ultimate life-and-death war, loss and horrific tragedy outcomes. The war time “For the Want of a Nail” poster applies one-hundred-or-more fold to the need to stop transmission of steganographic messages in data files, to prevent widespread disasters. At this writing, tools which detect steganographic payloads prior to decoding or neutralizing them are enormously cumbersome and inefficient for the preponderance of computer security applications for which stego-image neutralization is needed. This was pointed out in a June 2013 presentation in Montpellier France, by some of the internationally-recognized experts in steganalysis, who admit that current steganalytic solutions, including by some the presenters, only apply in laboratory conditions and some are heavily hedged by assumptions and caveats; significant challenges remain unsolved in order to implement good steganography and steganalysis in practice. See Ker, Andrew D., Patrick Bas, Rainer Böhme, Rémi Cogranne, Scott Craver, Tomá{hacek over (s)} Filler, Jessica Fridrich, and Tomá{hacek over (s)} Pevný. “Moving Steganography and Steganalysis from the Laboratory into the Real World,” in Proceedings of the First ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security, pp. 45-58. ACM, 2013.)) Even the title of this paper, “Moving Steganography and Steganalysis from the Laboratory into the Real World,” illustrates both the appreciated high hurdle of real-world steganography fighting and the presumed axiomatic nature of steganography and steganalysis as inseparable. Most notably, however, the Ker et al. article identifies, in easy-to-read section headings, twenty-three enumerated “open problems” in addressing steganography, even though as the article itself sets forth at the outset, “steganography is now a fairly standard concept in computer science.” If a standard concept has, as of June 2013, twenty-three “open problems,” there can be no question that meaningful and broad-basis solutions for steganography have not heretofore been recognized to date.
There remains a need in computer science, therefore, for broadly applicable and effective, simple and inexpensive means for dealing with—and eradicating—steganography in digital media.